The Cadillac Allante was the Most Expensive GM Blunder Of The 80s - and a Unique and Interesting Car

There are very few cars that can boast the story of the Cadillac Allante - a vehicle designed by Pininfarina, and built by a joint US-Italian team, utilizing Boeing 747s to fly the parts in one direction, and the semi-assembled cars back to Detroit. Known as the "Allante Air Bridge," it can certainly be viewed as the longest assembly line in history (with apologies to the Nash-Healey), and a very unique occurrence amidst large car manufacturers.

Cadillac wanted to be the standard of the world again, and take on cars like the Mercedes-Benz SL and Jaguar XJ-S, that were cutting in to its market share. The result was the Allante - a two-seat roadster built to world class standards that cost nearly twine as much as any other offering from Cadillac at the time - with a sticker of $54K, the Allante was a $120K car in 2020 dollars - a very ambitious price tag for any GM product of the 1980s.

GM hoped to sell 8000 cars a year - what would have been half of the luxury convertible market in the US. Coming up against Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, and BMW, this goal is remarkably arrogant, and it's of little surprise that most sales years failed to realize half of that. While the Allante could have had the quality and engineering to compete strongly, bad decisions based on rushed production and corporate schedules sabotaged the effort - electrical demons and leaky tops plagued the first two years of production, not to mention front wheel drive and an anemic engine. By the time 1993 rolled around, and the Allante was all but sorted out, it was too late, and the project was quashed.

All of that said, the cars today represent a real value in the collector market, and very few cars with a story this interesting and statistics like the Allante's can be bought for such reasonable money. Most people have forgotten these cars, and showing up in one tends to bring interested questions and even appreciative looks - Pininfarina's design still looks fresh and lovely today. Love them or hate them, one can't deny that we'll probably never see a project as ambitious as this one from a large manufacturer anytime soon.

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